Referrer Spam Concept
What is Referrer Spam?
Referrer Spam is a technique that has been able to bring spam to platforms of Web Analytics how Google analytics. It is a process that, Through the use of bots, get the URL of a website to appear on the page they want to promote so that, thus, it can be index more easily in search engines and, at the same time, the owners of the linked websites click out of curiosity, increasing their traffic and generating some influence.
At this time, there are two different types in which the actions of this spam can be categorized. On the one hand there is the Crawler Referral Spam, which indexes sites by modifying or publishing some type of text to drive traffic to the place you want and, apart from this, there is the Ghots Referral Spam, which takes advantage of a Google Analytics error to generate false visits at the statistical level (since it does not consist of real visits).
Detecting Referrer Spam is easy. In case of suspicion, the editor or webmaster has to enter the Google Analytics reports chapter and, within it, enter the acquisition tab and search within Media sources, references or channels. There, the moment a strange URL appears, you will be facing a case of this type of spam.
It is a method with which many portals try to obtain traffic based on visits from curious visitors in order to properly index in the Google search engine and start positioning to increase their volume of visitors.
What is Referrer Spam for?
Referrer Spam, in the eyes of those who use it, is an unethical means with which to try to obtain more visits by falsifying the statistics of the websites to which it is linked. It is an automated procedure, made by programming bots that are in charge of getting to it with the links; but the visits it generates are false and only manage to draw the attention of those who check Analytics or other platforms of that type.
In the eyes of the linked web, it is basically a minor annoyance. At first, it may seem like a new source of traffic to get more authority and improve positioning; however, they are only empty figures, which do not add additional value to the web.
Examples of Referrer Spam
Entering, for example, in the Google Analytics search engine to see the statistics of our website, https://neoattack.com, and looking for those possible sources of traffic, addresses such as semalt.com, darodar.com or hulfingtonpost.com are clear examples of Referrer spam (of both types). Like these, there are many more similar URLs, sometimes imitations of real web pages with a small variation in some of the letters.
More information about Referrer Spam
In case you want to learn more about referrer spam, such as how to easily combat or detect it, we suggest you take a look at the following links.
